Ruth Gilligan, 2024 readers’ prize for “The Broken Fields”

Readers loved the “suspense” and “dramatic tension” of this 352-page book, whose prologue piques curiosity: New York, 2018, a photo exhibited in a gallery shows a cold room and a dead man, hanged in the feet. The plot then moves towards Ireland at the end of the 1990s, in the midst of the mad cow crisis, where the “tradition of the eight butchers”, a pagan ritual of slaughtering livestock, continues. No need to say more. We would break the dramatic spring of a book borrowing from thriller, social novel and feminist advocacy.

“Dark, wild, captivating”

“The Broken Fields” has already received the 2021 Christopher Ondaatje Prize from the very British Royal Society of Literature. It is a “dark, wild and captivating” story, said Colum McCan, renowned Irish author, at the time.

On Saturday, Ruth Gilligan expressed her happiness at being awarded an award in Cognac. “Thank you to the festival, readers, moderators, translators and drivers. Bravo, too, to all the authors,” declared with modesty the one who was born in Dublin in 1988 and today lives in London, where she also works as a journalist and university professor.

Friday in Cognac, two other writers were distinguished. French author Muriel Zürcher received the ALÉ prize (awarded by middle school students) for “We do not separate the deaths of love” (Éditions Didier jeunesse, 2022). The Italian novelist Dario Levantino won the Jean-Monnet prize for young high school students and students for “Les coeurs bombes” (Éditions Rivages, 2024).